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Answer

In simple terms, Bulletproof is a valid range proof for secret transactions. This is a publication of the work of the Applied Cryptography Group at Stanford University. This project is under the supervision of Professor Dan Boneh and includes Stanford University, University of London, Blockstream students and doctoral researchers. “The bulletproof is designed to enable efficient confidential transactions in Bitcoin and other encryption currencies.”

A common misconception is that bitcoin deals are somehow anonymous, secret. The press often touts so, especially in the services of crime.

The Stanford Cryptography Applied Group aims to make Bitcoin Bulletproof.

The irony of the payment systems in the modern age is about how public is the digital currency. Many industries have been built and are still built for the collection of payment information. And Bitcoin has surely taken step to prevent the encroachment of institutional electronic payments, but it is a long way from anonymizing cash, as a matter of fact.

Bulletproofs and Scaling

Nothing is evidently clear as far as scaling is concerned. But there is a general idea that Bulletproofs assist in scaling up. The Big block size have so far been champions but they come under the criticism of slower transaction time and higher fees. Meanwhile, the state-of-the-art arguments states that bitcoin doesn’t dedicate itself to micropayments, moreover for a standardized settlement and storage value.

Authors like authors Benedikt Bünz, Jonathan Bootle, Dan Boneh, Andrew Poelstra, Pieter Wiulle, Greg Maxwell insist on the fact that if all the Bitcoin transactions used Bulletproofs and are confidential then it will shift the current blockchain size i.e., 160GB to only 17GB as the latest evidence suggests.

Bulletproofs are the proof of no short non-interactivity knowledge without requiring a reliable setup. This case is exactly same as SNARKs.

“A Bulletproof can be used to persuade a person to verify that an encrypted plaintext is well formed. For example, prove that some encoded is within a certain range, without revealing anything else in terms of numbers, “the ACG team insisted. The balance in using Bulletproofs is being verified, as it “takes more time than SNARK proof verification.”

Instead of covering and obscuring the entire blockchain, bulletproofs simply hides the quantity sent within the transaction. The sender and recipient addresses will still be displayed, but the amount sent will not be displayed. And while there is no total anonymity, the added bulletproof confidentiality can be addressed by the operational blockade already.

How does it work?

Currently, all transactional information like the wallet address and in particular the number of sent Bitcoins are displayed on the Bitcoin block. And this jeopardize the privacy of all users. For example, if we want to pay through the Bitcoin network, this means that all salaries will be displayed on the blockchain network. This, in turn, can mean that someone (like your landlord) can look up how much you are earning money and then he can increase your rent.

Confidential transactions are essential to bring a higher level of privacy to any kind of blockchain. Confidential transactions combine and use some cryptographic tricks so that only the recipient and the sender of a transaction are aware of the amount which is being transacted. These cryptographic tricks allow users to obscure the amounts they are performing and it still allows the viewers to perform maths in droppings. Basically, one can still check that the amount of sent bitcoins is greater than the amount of bitcoins received.

Confidential transactions can best be described as a way to prove to others that a valid security transaction does not convey information about the security transaction itself. Current recommendations for evidence without CT knowledge have been either banned or require reliable setup. Not a wish.

And if there come a need to prove multiple range proofs, that is the case for multisig transactions then complexity and size will extend linearly. For example, if one proof is 2 kB in size, the two proofs are going to be of 4 kB, this makes three proofs 6 kB, and so on.

In addition, zero-knowledge proof usually requires a reliable configuration: they must be initialized by a trusted authority. However, the security features of the Bitcoin system do not apply to that authority, because in practice this means that authority can produce “false” evidence. These false evidence can lead to uncontrolled and undeclared inflation.

Solution by Bulletproofs

In any distributed system where the evidence is transmitted on a network or stored for a long time, short proofs reduce the overall cost.

Bulletproofs will greatly reduce the evidence of cryptography, from 8 KB to 734 bytes, depending on the state of the transaction. Moreover, when dealing with multiple proofs, the size increases by only a few percent instead of the linear scale. In addition, bolts protectors do not require a reliable configuration/setup.

The first version of Bulletproofs has already been implemented in the Bitcoin crypto libsec256k1 library, which can verify the proofs three and a half times faster than the verifier for the classic rangeproofs. This is a downward replacement for classical rangeproofs which does not affect other aspects of the system and is therefore very easy to integrate.

Confidential Transactions so far has been only a theoretical concept because implementation is very strict. With Bulletproofs, Bitcoin ‘s Confidential Transactions are more likely to be executed unexpectedly.

Conclusion –

Bullet technology is still young and newborn, and while other locked developers are interested in adding it to their technology station, it will not see the implementation of bitcoin at any time.

Furthermore, before implementing with Bitcoin as a high profile Cryptocurrency, it has to be placed and tested on a small platform like monero or Mimblewimble.